According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) prognosticators, China will officially surpass the U.S. as the economic superpower in 2016, a mere five years away. As MarketWatch starkly put it, “whoever is elected U.S. president next year […] will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy.”

Ouch.

The IMF study does have some flaws. As the editors at Investor’s Business Daily point out, the IMF used overall GDP in their forecast instead of per capita GDP, a much more accurate predictor of comparative economic health: “Per-capita GDP in the U.S. is $42,517 in 2005 dollars. In China, it’s about $2,802. Even by 2030, China doesn’t get close to U.S. per-person output, not even at current growth rates.” Those growth rates (currently 10 percent for China and about 2 percent for the U.S.) are also unlikely to remain static, as the IMF blithely assumes.

So China might not overtake us as fast as the IMF would have us believe. But the fact remains — China, a communist country, is growing its GDP at nearly five times the rate of the United States. Is this not an astonishing, embarrassing, and frightening state of affairs? And it’s not as if the IMF is the only agency playing Cassandra to America’s economic future. Standard & Poor’s recently warned that unless policy makers quickly address our monstrous national debt — now in excess of $14 trillion — the U.S. could lose its AAA credit rating, a previously unthinkable possibility.

Most alarming of all, according to an analysis by USA Today, a “record 18.3% of the nation’s total personal income was a payment from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other programs in 2010. Wages accounted for the lowest share of income — 51.0% — since the government began keeping track in 1929.” That’s right — wages now account for a lower share of income than during the Great Depression, when a full quarter of the workforce was unemployed.

Yes! Well said!
Noblesse Oblige concurrs. And the GOPhers don’t get it because they don’t want to get it. They are (mostly) sane and literate. But they continue to collaborate with the Demonrats to overthrow the Constitution and turn the USA into a communist economy ruled by an islamic jihadist elite.
Carefully considered, all the available evidence supports this contention.
This has some resemblance to the collusion of the Beast and the False Prophet in the Book of Revelation.

Can the Tea Party save us? God saved only eight people, because they obeyed Him, in the time of the Flood. He saved but one family in the siege of Jericho, because they obeyed Him. He saved but four obedient people when He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.Can we find a message for us in these accounts?

All we need to do is look at Greece and Portugal to see what our future is going to look like. Both Greece and Portugal got major loans from the European Union and all it did was kick the can down the road a bit. Both countries are still bankrupt and now the interest rates on their bonds is skyrocketing because nobody wants to lend them money. Nothing will change in these countries unless they fundamentally change the way they run their governments and their social-welfare states. But they’re never going to do that, which is why they are still going to go broke. And I doubt Germany is about to give them any more money, which means the EU could be falling apart soon. This is what we have to look forward to. Unless we do something soon, we will end up just like the European countries unless we stop this madness. But, with Obama in the White House, he has absolutely no desire to change anything.

Talked to an old friend today about our situation. I asked him how many
Countries in EU have states or states rights within their
Countries. He thought that probably only
Switzerland had any thing like states similar to USA. Point being
The states can make it happen and if the Feds don’t like it then I will be moving back to the Midwest (Nebraska) and fight.them or move to Texas and secede with them and wAit for others to follow. States rights will
Win out

The Fair Tax will fix it all. Eliminate the income tax all together, implement a consumption tax of 24% and exempt food and housing. The lefties could even soak the rich by adding 10% to luxery items and exempting all that make less than 150% over the poverty line. Face it; the super-rich don’t pay income tax, they pay long term capital gains on dividends and other earnings at a much lower rate than most pay to the feds. Govt revenues would soar and the debt shrink to nearly nothing if spending does not increase. It’s time the Hiltons, Kennedy’s and the rest of the trust funders pay their share. WAKE UP AMERICA!

Time can be bought by the US taking the Icelandic route, and defaulting on what it owes. Those who are owed will be stinged, but what other option is there?

Plus, I am thinking that the Tea Party folk need to change one thing about themselves: Giving more than lip service to what makes the US great is universally valid, even though it isn’t universally seen.

For the physical distance between the heartland of the United Kingdom and the heartland of the US is less than the cultural distance between the heartland of the United Kingdom, or the heartland of the US, and Brussels.

So we know that many more people will be living longer and soaking up more Social Security and expensive health care in these lives made longer by the expensive health care; a sort of double whammy. I agree that this is more of a problem than Islamic terrorism, but I don’t see the solution.

I’m kind of ambivalent about Obamacare, but I believe it is actually designed to provide healthcare cost savings. As a nation, we spend more per capita on healthcare than other industrialized countries, and get less for the money we spend.

I work in the finance sector of the healthcare industry, and a lot of Obamacare does make sense. Retaining HMOs and PPOs in more or less their current form pretty much ensures that healthcare will remain firmly based in capitalist principles. If it works, and it probably will, a lot of dollars that would have been spent on healthcare could be used for other priorities (or won’t need to be printed at all).

As far as entitlements go, the boomers should be paid their social security benefits. They paid into the system under duress, and deserve to get their money back. I think the country can grow itself out of the current mess. If Congress DID NOTHING, the CBO projects the deficit to decline to about a couple of percent of GDP in 2019, which is manageable.

I have no doubt we spend more but please cite any statistics or studies which demonstrate we get less than other industrialized countries. Don’t include infant mortality or longevity rate studies unless you can account for variations in the metrics. Also, please don’t cite any studies which cover obesity related diseases. Eating is a personal choice. Sadly, for the most part Americans choose to be fat but at least they are free to do so… today.

What you will find on an apples to apples basis is that on balance, we have the shortest waits, the best equipped hospitals, and the greatest success in some of the most serious diseases anywhere in the world.

Can we cut costs (while maintaining quality) and increase portability? Of course, but only if there is a private sector motivation to do so such as tort reform. This is just one change that will reduce the cost of drug development (I know what I am talking about on this particular issue), give greater latitude to medical decision making, and allow hospitals to create efficiency programs for elective treatments without being sued for “cutting corners” because they didn’t follow the most absurd standard of care conjured up in the mind of attorney. Obamacare will do none of these things. It is far more likely to increase costs starting with the 10′s of thousands of federal bureaucrats who will be sitting in an office park in Maryland generating work for the rest of us.

It is clear that by and large the Republicans are not serious about the deficit and the debt. It is still business as usual. The media plays the issue as a political game between the sober Beltway types and those tea partying ‘deficit hawks.’ So unless there is a true sea change after the 2012 election, there will be collapse. And the solution will be imposed from the outside.

Is there a way out? Sure: actually adhere to the Constitution. The result? ~90% of the Fed gov’t disappears, including vast swathes of agencies whose regulations serve to throw not sand but boulders in the gears of businesses. Business of all size booms. Wealth is created that benefits almost everybody. Fed expenditures drop like a rock.

Welfare disappears, at least as far as it is driven at the Fed level (and, after all, what state wants to forgo getting back from the Feds at least some of what the Feds have taken away in taxes? I suspect most states would end almost all welfare if left to themselves). Among the side effects would be a drop-off in the flood of illegal immigration, or at least a shift to those who actually will work, since there would be no Fed requirements that the states provide for them in any way, including no requirements that a hospital provide them with free med care.

Oh, and did I mention that SocSec and Medicare would end? I’ve checked: there’s no justification for them in the Constitution.

Pipe dream, I know, I mean, whoever heard of actually expecting people to care about what’s in the Constitution and insisting that their legislators follow it? Silly.

O, I get it, since you’re convinced that following the Constitution=someone somewhere won’t get healthcare therefore we shouldn’t follow the Constitution.

Disgraceful. If you think the states should allow the Feds to force the citizens of each state to join a Federal healthcare program at gunpoint, fine: amend the Constitution. Don’t flagrantly ignore it just because it doesn’t allow the Feds to do every durnfool thing you think it should. And if you can’t get the Constitution amended, then just maybe what you think is so all-fired important for it to say just ain’t.

Or at least be honest about your disrespect for our nation’s foundational law. Don’t pretend you honor it. Laugh, as I do, at the ‘progressives’ like Obama and Pelosi who honor it with their lips as they flout it continuously.

Of course the reality is, you’re right: the electorate is so dissolute, so ignorant, and so shortsighted, that the prospect that King Gov’t might not force them to have a retirement and med program, no matter how substandard and doomed to failure it is, will cause them to recoil at even tiny efforts to return to Constitutional gov’t.

I redid the calculations for the national economy to estimate how close the edgbe of the clift is earlier this year. With the current Government Debt Fed funds rate of 4.8% is unrcoverable. A full two terms of Obama is unrecoverable.
By unrecoverable I am including conditions that we have to allow American girls to go to India for money as mail order brides as recoverable. I can not imagine how Obaam and the Democrats could choose to drive the country in this direction. Ireland could be a good case study as their government has now put them in a hole of 160% of GDP,
The other side is that the next thiry years are the most economicly dynamic in all history. It is possible with a Reagan or a Coolidge the countrry could drive out in as little as five years.